After Limerick
English policy and aggravated by the peculiar conditions which prevailed in Ireland. And England's policy besides being extremely disastrous to Ireland, was certainly not beneficial to herself. In the years following the revolution she lost her best chance of drawing the two kingdoms more closely together in sympathy and interest, and the chance once gone never came back.
But the whole policy of England towards Ireland after 1691 can naturally not be judged from a modern standpoint; it can only be judged in the light of the prevailing theories and ideas of the age. It was a period of intense class and national egotism; it was a time when the interests of the mass of the people were sacrificed as a matter of course to the desires of the ruling class and the interests of subordinate parts of an empire to those of the centre; it was a period when religious toleration was still regarded as impracticable. Now, in restricting Irish trade and industry, England only followed the example of every European country which possessed dependencies, and in spite of constitutional theories Ireland was to all intents and purposes a dependency. After the Restoration both Ireland and Scotland had come to be looked upon in the same light as the new possessions in America.
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